had passed away. Fleda Druse would be a queen of queens, but there was
that queenliness in her now which was not Romany--something which was
Gorgio, which was caste, which made a shivering distance between them.

As he had spoken, she saw it all as he described it. Vaguely, cloudily,
the scene passed before her. Now and again in the passing years had
filmy impressions floated before her mind of a swift-flowing river and
high crags, and wooded hills and tents and horsemen and shouting, and a
lad that held her hand, and banners waved over their heads, and galloping
and shouting, and then a sudden quiet, and many men and women gathered
about a tent, and a wailing thereafter. After which, in her faint
remembrance, there seemed to fall a mist, and a space of blankness, and
then a starting up from a bed, and looking out of the doors of a tent,
where many people gathered about a great fire, whose flames licked the
heavens, and seemed to devour a Romany tent standing alone with a Romany
wagon full of its household things.

As Jethro Fawe had spoken, the misty, elusive visions had become living
memories, and she knew that he had spoken the truth, and that these
fleeting things were pictures of her sealing to Jethro Fawe and the death
of Lemuel Fawe, and the burning of all that belonged to him in that last
ritual of Romany farewell to the dead.

She knew now that she had been bargained for like any slave--for three
thousand pounds. How far away it all seemed, how barbaric and revolting!
Yet here it all was rolling up like a flood to her feet, to bear her away
into a past with its sordidness and vagabondage, however gilded and
graded above the lowest vagabondage.

Here at Manitou she had tasted a free life which was not vagabondage, the